Full professor of molecular genetics, synthetic biology and bioinformatics, and head of the Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.
We design RNA molecules that switch genes on and off, and antisense oligonucleotides that block bacterial riboswitches, as a route to new antibiotics.
Chimeric antisense oligonucleotides, delivered by cell-penetrating peptides, that bind FMN, TPP, SAM-I and glmS riboswitch mRNAs and stop the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria and E. coli.
Read about this workComputational design of hammerhead ribozymes that sense oligonucleotides and compute YES, NOT, AND and OR, first published in Nature Biotechnology (2005).
Read about this workThe EBWS and ExBWS web services for sequence analysis, the RSwitch database of riboswitches as drug targets, and the GHOST ribozyme generators.
Open the toolsProgrammable bead-based microfluidic devices for biochemical microarrays, and DNA libraries designed for parallel molecular computation.
Read about this workMartina Traykovska and Robert Penchovsky took part in Kliment’s Days 2026 in Sofia with a talk on pVEC-conjugated chimeric antisense oligonucleotides targeting bacterial TPP riboswitches.
Nikolet Pavlova and Robert Penchovsky presented genomic analyses of mRNA targets in macrolide-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae at Antibiotics 2026 in Barcelona.
Nine new papers this year, including the evolution of the TPP riboswitch in Genetica and a review of computational selection of allosteric RNAs. See publications
Nikolet Pavlova won a grant proposal for young researchers from the BNSF.
Robert Penchovsky received an outstanding scientist award in RNA synthetic biology, and spoke on allosteric ribozymes as biosensors at Kliment’s Days 2025.
Talk by Robert Penchovsky on antisense-oligonucleotide antibiotics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Sofia University made a video for the research in our laboratory.
Nikolet Pavlova won the best poster award at the 4th International Electronic Conference on Antibiotics.
Dr. Martina Traykovska, CV, assist. professor in the laboratory, won an award for first place for the work of a young microbiologist in a national contest by the Foundation in the name of Acad. Prof. Stephan Angeloff on March 7, 2023, for our paper Engineering antisense oligonucleotides as antibacterial agents that target FMN riboswitches and inhibit the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria monocytogenes, and Escherichia coli (see the image below). Bravo Martina!
